How to Turn Your Joomla Website into a Traffic Magnet? Useful Strategies for Businesses

You may be selling shoes online or soul food, what you need today is SEO. Search engine optimization is what keeps you on top of every SERP and keeps you visible. Therefore, no matter what you are selling online, you need a search engine-friendly algorithm to help your business soar.

Millions of users are right now using your business related keywords to look for products you might sell. However, what fraction of the million is actually ending up at your digital doorstep today? A countless number of Joomla websites regularly face the website traffic challenge, since they are not SEO friendly by nature. According to Sherman Square Marketing, The truth is no e-commerce site was ever SEO-friendly. You have to work a little to make them the traffic magnets you want them to be.

What are SEO friendly URLs?

You can employ Joomla plugins that can replace dynamically generated URLs with new ones. These new URLs are the alias of the menu items that you may be trying to sell on the page. URL rewriting is a great option that comes with these plugins. The rewriting option lets you generate reader-friendly and search engine friendly URLs, which rank better and surely make more sense to the human users. While you are at it, do not forget to change the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess.

Now, only URLs are not enough, and we all know that by now. You need search friendly H1 tags and meta descriptions. For that, you will need a strong keyword list. You can get your niche-friendly keywords from several tools and plugins. You can try websites for keyword suggestion tools as well. The Joomla forum is a great place to get started if you are new to keyword selection and content development. Since it is an open forum for an open source CMS platform, you will get all the support you will ever need with niche specific keyword ideas and recommendations.

Social media sharing

It brings us to our next topic. You need to enable social media sharing on your website. Social links may not be significant in the house of Google, but they do contribute directly to popularity. If a patron shares a post or a product via his social media profile, you can expect at least ten more people in his friend list to check it out. You can never pass on the opportunity to be popular on social media, just because you have to add 4-5 buttons. Always include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,WhatsApp and Gmail sharing options on each post and product.

Use proper images with names and tags

The idea is to use proper image names and alt tags that work with people as well as search engines. Default names of images are incredibly arbitrary and rarely ever make any sense. Since you are now sure that your users will share the images and you want your search engine to find those images, give them blog/post-related names that are relatable and meaningful. Keep them easy to load (small but not too small) and high quality.

Get your hands on a reliable sitemap

You need to list the components of your site. Your search engine bots and human users must have a clear guidance system at disposal. We are not talking about neon signs and road maps. We are saying, a simple information hierarchy and image guidance system that will help your users make the next decision. Amazon.com is an ideal example in this case. Their smart use of imagery, icon, and color makes every amateur shopper feel like a pro when they are on Amazon. The navigation is elegant indeed.

Google likes it when websites have their content neat, clean and organized. You need oodles of content in a bucket and organize it into categories, subcategories and more. Once you complete the design of your website and you complete arranging all the menus and sub-menus, get a plugin that will help you generate a sitemap. In 2017, an XML Sitemap should be good enough for a website. JSitemap is quite the hot plugin for generating XML and HTML sitemaps for e-commerce and blog sites.

That is not the end of the story. You need to submit your map to Google webmaster. If you get a decent percentage of your traffic from Bing, do not forget to submit your XML map to Bing Webmaster as well.

Joomla SEO is synonymous with internal linking

Internal links are perfect for SEO. These are like steroids for your search engine friendliness. You want to boost your page rank; you need to work on your internal linking process. You can start by creating a homepage that is an online version of an index. You can now link your homepage to other articles on your domain.

Check out Neil Patel’s website for the best example of this. Create categories or menu items that link to each parent category or subcategory. Now, Joomla SEO plugins can help you create an excellent and organized top-down structure that is ideal for all Joomla SEO activities.

While creating your internal links, do not create links that are too deep. It is a rookie mistake since amateurs mostly think that high volumes of internal links mean great authority. Well, that is true, when they do not go link to Davy Jones Locker. Create links that are humanly possible to navigate. Do not think about bots too much, since bots are now thinking about human users only. You do not want to confuse users on your site. You want them to stick around, look around, move from one page to another, buy some stuff and share their experience on social media.

Joomla is one of the best CMS platforms for bloggers and sellers. If you like unique things and DIY projects, creating an SEO friendly Joomla website is going to be your poison. Almost everything you see on the CMS along with the builder is customizable. You can add and remove thousands of features, and you can brag about it on the Joomla forum!